“The city has to find a way of making urban agriculture work in each and every space in the city. Since the inner city is filled with buildings, rooftop gardens is one of the ways we are trying to green the city,” Motsusi says.

By: Schalk Burger
Engineering News
Mar 17, 2017

Excerpt:

Officials of the City of Johannesburg (CoJ) Food Resilience Unit and the Johannesburg Development Agency are, therefore, working to help establish rooftop vegetable gardens to ensure food security for vulnerable people in the inner city and promote entrepreneurship.

The artisan who has to work ten hours a day at his trade, if he has been trained to love his garden, not only finds moderate working in it a pleasing recreation, but finds that it adds materially to his slender income.

By Mr. George Moore
Journal of Agriculture and Horticulture
July 1, 1906
(The Journal was the official organ of the Council of Agriculture of the Province of Quebec.)

Excerpt:

Again, looking at the question from an economic or several stand point, the advantages of a knowledge of horticulture are not to be despised. The lot of many a poor family might have been made smoother had their head have been taught, how properly to cultivate the little plot of land by which their cottage was surrounded.

Dr.Valerie Tarasuk, “I know, again, it seems counter-intuitive — you think well if you’re growing your own food you don’t need to buy it, you should have more food,” she said. But small urban gardens don’t produce enough, she said, and fill needs mostly temporarily because they are seasonal.

Objectives: To determine the extent to which Canadian adults’ food preparation and cooking skills and use of home or community gardens relate to their household food insecurity status; and to compare the food shopping and cooking behaviours of adults in food-secure and food-insecure households.

Only 29.4% of adults in food-insecure households reported using a home or community garden for food, compared with 43.5% of those in food-secure households (chi-square test, p < 0.05). The odds of food insecurity was not significantly associated with the use of gardens for food when this variable was included in a logistic regression model along with individual- and household-level socio-demographic characteristics (Table 2, column 4).
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March 16, 2017Comments Off on Adults’ food skills and use of gardens are not associated with household food insecurity in Canada

Photojournalist Henryk Ross was forced to work by the Nazi regime as a bureaucratic photographer for the Jewish Administration’s statistics department. He was one of at least 160,000 people held in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland.

Ross buried his negatives in 1944 in attempt to preserve the historical record of what had happened in Lodz. As one of the mere 877 recorded survivors of the ghetto, Ross returned for the negatives after Lodz’s liberation, discovering that more than half of the original 6,000 remained intact.

In recent years, urban agriculture has been asserting its relevance as part of a vibrant and diverse food system due to its small scale, its focus on nutrition, its contribution to food security, its employment opportunities, and its role in community building and social mobility. Urban agriculture may also be a tool to re-appropriate a range of abandoned or unused irregular spaces within the city, including flowerbeds, roundabouts, terraces, balconies and rooftops. Consistently, all spaces that present a lack of identity may be converted to urban agriculture areas and, more specifically, to urban horticulture as a way to strengthen resilience and sustainability.

‘Grow It Yourself’ (GIY) is for a healthy, happy world where people grow their own food. Our team is passionate about changing the world one GIYer at a time.

Over the past four years, GIY’s ‘Get Ireland Growing’ initiative has supported over 400 community food growing projects, with €270,000 awarded to projects all across the country.

By Katy McGuinness
Independent.IE
Dec 11, 2016

Excerpt:

Community and voluntary organisations have until January 20 to apply for grants from GIY and Energia’s ‘Get Ireland Growing’ fund, which has a pool of €70,000 to award to groups wanting to start or further develop a community food-growing project in their area. The fund is split across three categories, ‘Sow’, ‘Grow’ and ‘Harvest’ with awards ranging from €500 to €2,000, and will support a minimum of 85 community food growing groups from all across the country.

“Securing this grant for the Urban Farm will create a healthier food source for many of our citizens.”

College Park
Themetroatalantaurbanfarm.com
Nov 5, 2016

Excerpt:

One notable aspect of the farm is that it specializes in growing year-round, and includes varieties of fruits and vegetables not typically grown in metro Atlanta’s climate. The farm recently installed solar panels, and collects water from underground springs for hydration.

Wilson says his vision and responsibility are simple. “Self- sufficiency, self-sustainability and every effort to protect the environment,” he added. “We don’t want anything to leave the farm, so we’ll compost, reuse water, collect solar energy and more.”

“Terraces home serves as a constant reminder of the origin of paddy rice civilization in a flat world context, threatened by various types of pollution currently at an alarming level.”

Design Boom
Nov 6, 2016

Excerpts:

In Vietnam, H&P architects has completed a large residence featuring accessible platforms that integrate urban farming as a basis for sustainable development. located in the city of ha tinh, ‘terraces home’ seeks to combine architecture with agriculture, forming a new typology that the architects refer to as ‘agritecture’. influenced by the country’s terraced rice fields, the property intends to dissolve boundaries between internal and external living.

Our experiment with growing ginger is just one example of how urban farms can be hot beds of innovation; pioneering new sustainable growing techniques, developing novel crops, and testing new markets.

By Matt Kauffman
Buffalo Rising
October 20, 2016

Excerpt:

Being a tropical plant, growing local sources of ginger in Buffalo is going to include significant challenges. Nonetheless, last year, 5 Loaves Farm was the first farm in WNY to bring local ginger to market. Our “baby ginger” was grown in our hoop houses, right here on the West Side of Buffalo! This year a number of other growers are now trying it out, and our local sources of ginger are growing…

Other ventures by the city to promote rice consumption include establishing an eco-friendly rice production complex, expanding the sales network and support for Gyeongbokgung Rice, and launching field study programs for students. (image: KobizMedia/ Korea Bizwire)

Despite being the most crowded city in Korea, Seoul is still home to 602 rice farms.

By Korea Bizarre
October 10, 2016

Excerpt:

In 2015, some 3.49 million square meters of land were devoted to rice farming in Korea’s capital, producing 1,805 tons of rice, which roughly equals the total daily consumption of the city’s population of 10 million – given that the average rice consumption per capita is 172.3 grams per day (2015).

Of the rice farmed in Seoul, 54 percent was sold to retail franchises, 26 percent to the government, and 15 percent directly to consumers. The rest was consumed by the farmers themselves.

A panel discussion chaired by Jayant Kumar Banthia, former State Chief Secretary and chancellor, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS), presented several ideas to incorporate urban farming into the city’s plans

By Diipti Jhangiani
The Hindu
Oct 9, 2016

Excerpt:

During the launch, Dr. Parasnis presented the carbon baseline survey of Navi Mumbai. She also shared vital statistics on the high pesticide and heavy metal content in commercially-grown fruits and vegetables. She shared the results of a survey by the University of Baroda, showing how commercially-grown fruits and vegetables contain pesticides like Aldrin, Chlordane, Dichlorvos much beyond the when permissible levels were 0.1 mg/kg.

The Urban Agriculture package, meanwhile, does propose specific incentives to encourage farming. It proposes bypassing public review and approval entirely, to automatically allow farms on up to nearly an acre of commercial-zoned land, or of unlimited size on unoccupied residential land. The Urban Agriculture package expands this by-right approval to construction of greenhouses, sheds, and fences; community gatherings and group class instruction; and sales of both raw and processed foods. It imposes no limitations on use of GMOs, pesticides, fertilizer, or industrial farming equipment.